Podolia and her Jews, a brief history

By David Bickman

The
earliest Jewish settlers in Podolia are believed to have come from
Italy, Greece and Turkey and to have been of Sephardi or Oriental,
including Palestinian, origin. These settlers have left virtually
no evidence of their presence in the region save for some written
records. Substantial evidence, however, still exists to document
the arrival and settlement of the area by Ashkenazi Jews from the
Germanic lands and Poland. Documentary evidence exists today
attesting to the presence of Jews in 3 different towns in Podolia
in the 1400's.

Jews began to come to Podolia in significant numbers
from the West in the 1500's, particularly after 1569 when most of
what today is the Ukraine was annexed to Poland. By 1569, approximately
750 Jews lived in 9 localities in Podolia. By 1648, the year
of the Ukrainian revolt led by Khmelnitsky, there were approximately
4000 Jews living in 18 localities in Podolia.

The economic position
filled by the Jews in the 17th century in Podolia was primarily that
of a middle class between the Polish landowning nobles and the Ukrainian
landless peasants. The Jews largely prospered
in this position gradually coming to be identified by the local population with
the Polish ruling class, and they were equally resented.

The Khmelnitsky
revolts which commenced in 1648, were largely directed against Polish
rule in the Ukraine, but the Jews were equally victimized in their
barbaric destruction. In the period 1651-1655, tens of thousands
of Jews were murdered in the Ukraine and eastern Poland; they were virtually
eliminated from Podolia in this period. Massacres are known to have occurred
in such towns as Bar, Kamenets Podolsk and Polonnoye.

Podolia briefly came under
Ottoman control, from 1672-1699, and was then reacquired by Poland in 1699. Poles
and Jews again came into Podolia, the Poles again as rulers and the Jews again
as the Poles' local administrators, merchants, innkeepers and petty traders. The
Jews lived as a separate religious and national group, with their own virtual
government within a government; they were prohibited from participating in
the civic government created by the Polish rulers. The Jewish leadership,
known in each district as the Kahal, had complete authority over the Jews and
was also responsible for collecting taxes from the Jews and remitting them
to the Polish government, operating, in effect, as a parallel institution to
it.

By 1765, there were approximately 45,000 Jews living in 554 towns and
villages in Podolia.

Poland as a separate nation became progressively
weaker and more ineffective in the 18th century, gradually losing more
and more of her territory to the powerful nations which surrounded her: Prussia
to the west, Austro-Hungary to the south and Russia to the east. In
1793, Russia annexed a substantial part of eastern Poland, including Podolia. In the hundred years preceding this annexation,
life for the Jews in Podolia had been relatively peaceful insofar as persecution
by the Poles or Ukrainians was concerned; the grinding poverty and religious
and cultural depravation of the region had given rise to the birth of Chassidism in Medziboz, Podolia,
led by the Baal Shem Tov, and there were the earliest murmurings of the Enlightenment
(known as the "Haskala") emanating from Germany. But the
Russian annexation was to change life irrevocably for the Jews of all of
the annexed lands, including Podolia.

Shortly after the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the Russian government created Podolia as a gubernia
(province) of Russia, and Ushitsa as a uezd (county) within Podolia. The
largest single ethnic group in the gubernia was by far Ukrainian, followed by the Jews, Poles, Russians and Germans. The border
with Austro-Hungary was the Zbruch River (and was to remain so until after
WWI), about 80 km west of Nova Ushitsa.

Special laws pertaining to the
Jews were introduced by the Russian government very shortly after the
annexations from Poland. For
example, in 1804, a statute was passed that, among other things, required
the Jews to acquire family names; until this time Jews had given names
and patronymic names, but no surname. The Kahals were initially
accepted and recognized by the Russian government, largely because many
of them had large, outstanding debts to Christian institutions and the
government wanted these debts repaid before the Kahals were abolished. The
Kahals were used by the government to collect these debts, collect taxes
and, later, to enforce various Russian
laws directed at the Jews.

In 1827, Czar Nicholas I introduced the draft
for the Jews (by 1856, Jews were a greater proportion of the Army's soldiers
than they were of the general population). Jews were drafted at
age 18 and served for 25 years. Some Jews were taken from their parents
at age 12 for 6 years of preparatory training (these recruits were called "cantonists")
prior to commencing their military service. Substitutions for draftees
were allowed who also had to be Jews; in this way, the wealthier Jews
were often able to bribe their way out of military service and the poorer
Jews were even more victimized. The
administration of the draft was the responsibility of the Kahals, causing
much dissension and resentment within the Jewish communities and undermining
their internal solidarity. Because one of the major objectives
of the draft was conversion to Christianity (Russian, or Greek, Orthodoxy),
the techniques employed by the Jews to evade the draft were many, varied
and often drastic.

The Russian conscription law also spawned the development
of a new profession, that of the informer who reported to the authorities
on efforts by the Jews to evade the draft. There are numerous reported
cases of such informers being caught and punished by the Jewish communities,
one particularly serious incident of this nature having occurred in Nova
Ushitsa in the 1830's.

Established by Catherine II in 1791, the "Pale
of Settlement" was
clarified and demarcated in 1835 by the Russian government, and Jews
were required to maintain their residence only within the "Pale" (this
law remained in effect until 1915). In 1843, Jews were expelled
from Russian lands along the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian frontiers
and thereafter were not permitted to live within 50 km of the frontier
with Austro-Hungary (this law remained in effect until 1904). In
addition, Jewish males were forbidden to marry until age 18, and Jewish
females until age 16. In 1836,
the government ordered and implemented the censorship of Jewish books
and the closing of Jewish printing houses; four years later, educational "reform" was
introduced. By 1844, schools created by the government for Jews
were spreading throughout the "Pale", the primary if not sole
objective of these schools being to convert the Jews into Russians, culturally and religiously. One such school
opened in Kamenets Podolsk in 1849; and one in Proskurov (now Khmelnitsky)
in 1850. By 1855, such schools existed throughout the "Pale". The
vast majority of the Jews avoided these schools, so Jewish schools were
placed under government supervision and secular subjects taught in Russian
became a compulsory part of their educational programme.

The Kahals were
abolished in 1844 and the Jews came completely under Russian law. The
Jewish leadership in each community now had its authority limited largely
to strictly religious and communal matters. While
this step by the authorities in and of itself had little immediate effect
and the kahals were still able to maintain some power within the Jewish
communities until late in the 19th century, various subsequent government
measures undertaken against the Jews ultimately brought an end to Jewish
self government and Jewish life as it had hitherto been known.

In 1856
the draft of cantonists was abolished and conversionist policies were
ameliorated. Children were permitted to return to their parents
if they had not been converted; those who converted were placed with
reliable Russian Orthodox families. A Polish insurrection in 1863,
supported by many of the Jews, led to severe repression of both
Poles and Jews by the Czarist regime; the modest liberalization of rule
in the previous ten years abruptly ended and, in fact, was reversed.

The
census of 1840 counted 115,143 Jews in Podolia, out of a total population
of 1,691,928 (about 7%). A similar census in 1888 counted
325,907 Jews out of a total population of 2,470,142 (about 13%). In
1897, a detailed census found the Jews to be 12.3% of the total population
of Podolia. The
peak proportion of Jews to the total population was likely about 13%
as about half of the emigrants from Podolia in the period between 1881
and the outbreak of WWI are believed to have been Jews.

For most of the
19th century, the Poles were the dominant class in Podolia, being most
of the landowners, factory owners and intelligentsia. The middle, or
merchant, class was predominantly Jewish, and the agrarian, or peasant,
class was almost exclusively Ukrainian. Relations
between the Poles and Ukrainians, to the extent that there were any at
all, were poor; the Jews often found themselves caught in between. Accordingly,
conflicts between the Polish and Ukrainian peoples inevitably led to
Jewish pain and suffering as both
accused the Jews of siding with the other. Whenever it suited the
Russian rulers, they exploited these inter-ethnic tensions, occasionally
permitting and even encouraging matters to "boil
over". Pogroms would result, in which the Jewish population would
suffer beatings, rapes, murders and looting.

While the Jews were not
initially adverse to the Russian annexations, having suffered considerable
persecution under the Poles and believing the Russians couldn't be any
worse, by the 1880's life in Podolia for the Jews (and, only to a slightly
lesser extent, everyone else as well) had become highly problematic and
virtually unbearable. The year 1881 saw the beginning of severely
repressive laws directed specifically against the Jews. The economic
improvement of the Jews' lot in the previous 20 years, during Alexander
II's rule, was abruptly ended under Alexander III's rule. Restrictions
were placed on the Jews' ability to earn a living and where they could
live; pogroms became commonplace. Authorities, under instructions from
above, stood by while Jewish homes and businesses were vandalized and
Jews were beaten, raped and murdered. One of the long-stated
objectives of the Russian government was now being achieved: emigration
of the Jewish population. In the period 1881-1914 several millions
of Jews left Russia for other parts of the world, primarily North America. Many
of these emigrants came from Podolia, where several pogroms occurred.

In
the early 1880's a number of pogroms occurred throughout the Ukraine,
63 of which were in Podolia. The pogrom nearest to Nova Ushitsa
took place in Zhmerinka, 40 miles to the northeast, in April, 1881. Repressive
government measures following the assassination of Czar Alexander II,
which took place on March 1, 1881, and for which the authorities unjustly
blamed the Jews, precipitated the pogroms and caused so much suffering
amongst the Jewish population in the Ukraine that many chose to leave
the country.

Economic restrictions imposed on the Jewish population by
the Russian government were almost always at the instance of, and in
order to pacify, Ukrainian and Polish citizens who claimed that they
could not compete, without the restrictions, with their Jewish neighbours.

Not
only the Jews, however, were dissatisfied with their lot in life in Czarist
Russia. While Jews for the most part were displaying
their disillusionment in the late nineteenth century by emigrating, some
joined their gentile neighbours in the various revolutionary movements
that were prevalent in Russia at the time. Central authority was weakening,
as became particularly evident in Russia's defeat in the war with Japan
in 1905. The government
attempted, with limited success, to blame this defeat on the Jews, notwithstanding
the uncontroverted fact that a disproportionate number of Jews served
in the Imperial army in the war against Japan. Pogroms occurred throughout
the Pale, 37 in Podolia. Such outrages are reported to have occurred
in November and December, 1905 in Kamenets Podolsk, Zhmerinka and Bershad. Some
Jews decided to fight back, resulting in the organization in Podolia
of self-defence units. Jews also continued to emigrate at record
levels, until it was halted by the outbreak of WWI.

Prior to the beginning
of WWI, Podolia was the most southwesterly gubernia in Czarist Russia. Podolia's
western boundary bordered on Galicia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire; her souther boundary bordered on Bukovina, also part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Czarist Russia and Austro-Hungary
were enemies in this conflict and much of Podolia was occupied, firstly
by Austro-Hungarian forces and later by German forces. Before the
war officially ended, Russia withdrew from the conflict as a result of
the onset of the Revolution. Shortly thereafter, the war ended and Germany
and Austro-Hungary were defeated. Podolia
was evacuated by the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, leaving a vacuum
insofar as governmental authority was concerned. For the next 4
or 5 years, anarchy prevailed as various factions, amongst them Ukrainian
nationalists and Russian Bolsheviks, fought each other for control of
the region.

Those few Jews who participated in the struggle for control
of the Ukraine in the period 1917-1922 were mostly on the side of the
Bolsheviks, though a small number threw in with the Ukrainian nationalists. In
July, 1917, the provisional Ukrainian government declared its independence
from Russia and granted autonomy to all minorities
within its boundaries. The initial reaction of the Ukrainian Jewish
communities was positive; however, the Kerensky regime, then in power
in Moscow, and the Bolshevik regime which followed it both opposed Ukrainian
independence. The
seizure of power in Moscow by the Bolsheviks led to anarchy throughout
the former Czarist empire, including the Ukraine, and Russia shortly
thereafter invaded the Ukraine to put down the independence attempt.

The
majority of the Jews took no position in the dispute between the Ukrainian
nationalists and the Russian Bolsheviks, rightly having come to the conclusion
that none of the combatting factions offered them anything better than
the miserable life they already knew under the Czars. There
were numerous pogroms in this period as well,
resulting in many deaths and further impoverishment of the Jews. Before
1919, the pogroms primarily occurred in the cities, one particularly
ugly such pogrom occurring in the city of Proskurov (Khmelnitsky). After
1919, they were more prevalent in the villages. Again, the Jews
were unfairly accused, this time of being pro-Bolshevik and anti-Ukrainian.
Jewish self-defence organizations were established in many cities, towns
and villages, as once again the "ruling" authorities
were either unwilling or unable to prevent attacks by the various factions
on the Jewish population.

The defeat of the Ukrainian nationalists by
the Bolsheviks was followed by numerous terrible pogroms against the
Jews in the Ukraine; these actions were most often led by Ukrainian soldiers
supported by Ukrainian civilians, and were "justified" as retaliation
against the Jews for their support of communism.

Of the three periods
in which pogroms occurred in Ukraine, the worst period was from 1917-1921. In
Podolia alone, 213 pogroms are recorded, the vast majority of them having
been committed by supporters of one or another of the various Ukrainian
nationalist movements that were operating at the time in the region.

The
Bolsheviks ultimately emerged as the victors of the conflict and the
entire Ukraine shortly thereafter underwent a harsh, involuntary and
forced adaptation to Communist domination that, some 75 years later,
it has yet to overcome. Agrarian reform, for example, starved millions
of Ukrainians, amongst them the Jews, to death. Many people were
forced to emigrate from Ukraine to other parts of the USSR; emigration
abroad was severely restricted to the point that very few people even
attempted to leave the country.

The Jews of Podolia at the beginning
of the Communist regime were for the most part town and village dwellers
engaged in small businesses as tradesmen and petty traders. Communism
virtually eliminated all of these occupations, causing the Jews to leave
the small towns and villages for the cities where they sought work in
factories and government-run stores as labourers and clerks. In
the 1920s, some Jews were able to emigrate abroad. While
western Europe and North America were largely closed to these emigrants in
this period, South America, Argentina and Brazil in particular, were relatively
open.

Life was hard in Podolia in the 1930s as well as before, but
political stability had by then been achieved, at a terrible cost in lives
and dislocation. As part of the overall Communist plan, agriculture was
collectivized and the middle class was abolished. The economic impact on the
Jews of Podolia and their Ukrainian neighbours was catastrophic. The
abolition of any religious practises other than Communism resulted in the closing,
by the end of the 1930s, of virtually all of the synagogues and other Jewish
institutions. Traditional
Jewish life, as it had existed in Podolia for hundreds of years, by 1939
virtually ended. The vast bulk of the Jews were now proletarians who,
but for their names and language (Yiddish) were indistinguishable from the
other people in whose midst they lived.

In September, 1939, Germany invaded
Poland from the west and, shortly thereafter, ostensibly for security and
safety reasons, but in fact as part of a previously arranged pact with
the Nazis, the Soviet Union entered Poland from the east. Germany
and the USSR divided Poland between them and, for a time, eastern Poland
was under Soviet domination. Almost two
years later, in late June, 1941, Germany and her allies (Hungary and Romania,
in particular) attacked eastern Poland and quickly advanced through this
region and into the western Soviet republics, including the Ukraine.

WWII
came to Podolia in July, 1941. By the time this
war ended, not only did Jewish life end in Podolia; the Jews, as
a people, were identified, segregated and murdered by the German occupiers
to such an extent that, after 1945, not even a semblance of Jewish life
remained.

Germany and the USSR divided Poland between them in the fall
of 1939. This move ended Poland's existence as an independent country
and extended Soviet Russia's western boundary westwards to include Galicia. Jews
seeking to escape German occupation moved from German-occupied Poland
to Soviet-occupied Poland and thence to, among other regions of the USSR,
Podolia. These
Jewish newcomers were more religious and familiar with Jewish culture,
customs and traditions than their Podolian brothers and sisters; they
had not been subjugated in Poland to the same kind of Communist indoctrination
that destroyed Jewish life in Podolia. Jewish
life in Podolia in the period 1939-1941 was briefly invigorated by these
newcomers, but this interlude ended with Germany's invasion of the Soviet
Union in June, 1941.

Part of Germany's plan for the invasion and occupation
of the USSR included the extermination of all of the Jews; therefore,
not long after the beginning of the invasion, the outright slaughter
of the Jewish civilian population of the occupied lands took place. The
vast bulk of Podolia was occupied in the first few months of the invasion,
by Hungarian and German forces. The
organized murder of Jewish civilians was undertaken by special German
forces, known as Einsatzgruppen, with assistance from regular German
forces as needed and from local collaborators, of whom there were many. Jews
were typically taken from their homes in the towns and villages of Podolia
and led out of town to pre-prepared sites where they were stripped, lined
up and shot, and then buried in mass graves. In some towns and
villages, ghettoes were set up and able-bodied Jews were kept for slave
labour, only to be murdered later, in the same fashion as the earlier "actions".

The
occupation of Podolia lasted until April, 1944, approximately 33 months. In
that period, the Germans "succeeded" in
destroying forever the Jewish communities that had existed there for
centuries. The
few survivors of these communities were persons who managed to evade
occupation by evacuating to the east far enough to never be subjected
to German rule. Most of these survivors either never returned to Podolia
or, if they did, they left soon after they returned. They saw that
nothing was left from before WWII, not even the cemeteries of their ancestors,
let alone the friends and relatives they had left behind.

Axis forces
actually entered Nova Ushitsa for the first time on July 12, 1941 when
a combined Hungarian-German unit occupied the town. The
101st Light Division of the German 17th Army entered Nova Ushitsa on
July 13, 1941 and 257th Division arrived on July 17th together with the
Hungarian Schnellkorps. The
Hungarian 1st motorized brigade arrived the following day.

The gathering
of the Jews in the Ushitsa county began within a few weeks or months
of the arrival of the Axis forces, and mass executions took place in
the surrounding area. Captured German wartime communications
from the region document mass executions of Jewish civilians in and around
Kamenets Podolsk, Zwiancyk and Sokolec in late August and early September,
1941.

A ghetto was established in Nova Ushitsa almost immediately
after the town was taken by the Axis forces, and Jews from the town and
from the immediately surrounding villages were gathered and confined
in this ghetto. There
were up to 3000 Jews confined here, approximately 1000 having been residents
of Nova Ushitsa prior to the occupation.

On August 20, 1942, most of
the Jews from the ghetto were marched to a pre-selected and prepared
site in the woods outside of town, known as "Trikhov", where
they were stripped, executed and then buried in a large pit. A
second "action", on October 15, 1942, similar
in style as the first, completed the extermination of the Jews of Nova
Ushitsa, except for perhaps a dozen or so who either escaped just before
the mass executions or, in one case, survived the actual shooting by
lying in the pit until dark and then climbing out and hiding in a Ukrainian
farmer's barn for 18 months until the area was liberated by Soviet forces.

In
late March and early April, 1944, Ushitsa county was the scene of heavy
fighting between German and Soviet forces. The 101st Jager
Division of the 3rd Panzer Korps was the last German force in Nova Ushitsa
and it withdrew to the advancing Soviets on March 27th, 1944 after rescuing
the 17th Panzer Division which was also defending the town.

A short time
after its liberation by the Soviet forces, a committee of local dignitaries
was appointed to investigate the criminal activities of the Axis occupation
forces in Nova Ushitsa. The mass burial pits were
opened and the bodies counted; interviews were conducted and thereafter
a protocol was released by the committee after its investigation was
completed. A
total of 3222 bodies were found in and around Nova Ushitsa. All but a
small number were Jews, and all were found naked. Some of the dead,
children in particular, were found to have been buried alive. The
vast majority, however, were found to have been murdered by a shot or
shots in the head.

The Protocol of the committee confirmed that the executions
were in the late summer and fall of 1942 and that they were committed
by German soldiers wih the assistance of local Ukrainian collaborators.

Liberation
of Nova Ushitsa did not revive the Jewish community, as the members of
that community were almost all dead. Moreover, the
area of the ghetto was physically destroyed, along with the Jewish cemetery,
by the German occupation forces shortly after the second liquidation
in October, 1942. The
few survivors of the War who returned to Nova Ushitsa after liberation
did not stay but moved on to other parts of the USSR or left the country
completely.

The continuing urbanization of Soviet society after WWII
pretty much eliminated what little there was of a Jewish presence in
the small towns and villages of Podolia. Then, in the 1970s and
1980s, with the advent of permitted emigration to Israel and the USA,
those few remaining Jews who were still alive and living in these areas
left and Jews virtually disappeared entirely from rural Ukraine. Visitors
to these places in the 1990s can find almost no evidence whatsoever of
the Jews' former presence, notwithstanding that they once comprised anywhere
from 30% to 75% of the population in the small towns of Podolia.